Make Me Work (15 page)

I ran down the grassy slope and across the parking lot. Clayton answered when I knocked on the flimsy barracks door, his big-toothed smile floating in the dim entrance of his shabby house. His parents worked on Saturdays and his sisters were out playing somewhere. It was getting toward lunch, but it seemed he'd just gotten up. He came out into the sunny parking lot blinking his eyes.

“Weren't you expecting me?” I said.

“Sure,” said Clayton, looking at the sky. “I was expecting you.”

We talked about what to do. The choices were not infinite, and we'd end up doing them all anyway—playing in the tunnels, getting lunch from Clayton's mother, buying stuff at the hospital store, jumping in the cinder pit—so the only question was in what order. I was trying to think of a way to avoid the pit altogether today. Clayton had vowed to push me off the highest part of the cliff the next time we went there.

“Let's go down in the tunnels,” I said.

“Too nice out,” said Clayton.

“Let's go look at the cows. We never do that anymore.”

“I don't want to see any cows. Let's go to the pit.”

Our game at the cinder pit was to pretend we were paratroopers—sprinting from the road's edge to the cliff and then leaping out into empty space. Clayton jumped into the pit's deepest place, where the drop was more than twenty feet. I stuck to the shallow end, where it was less than ten. Clayton lived for danger, which was one of the main differences between him and me. The other main difference was that he was black. For a long time I assumed that all black people liked danger more than white people did, because I didn't have anybody to compare Clayton to. He was the only black student in our entire school.

“I'm not going off the high end, Clayton.”

“Oh, Gabe,” he said, knowing I disliked that nickname. He punched me in the arm. “I was only kidding about that.”

We crossed a lawn into the center of the asylum and took the wide tree-lined boulevard past white gazebos and a band shell where the patients heard music in the summertime. The springtime grass was tender and pale green. The forsythia had long since lost their yellow flowers, but azaleas still burned like gas jets at the base of every stone-faced building—as though Mr. Parker, an asylum groundskeeper, had gone around adjusting them like the flames of his own little stove at home. The hospital's reservoir sparkled in the distance, a polished blue platter in an evergreen grove. Puffs of steam rose from metal grates in the grass, the exhaust from the tunnels that connected the whole hospital underground. I caught the sour institutional smell of the subterranean kitchens where Clayton's mother cooked.

From one of the towering gray buildings, a voice called to us. When we looked up, we saw a woman on the fifth or sixth floor, a paper-white face behind the bars of her window. Framed by stone blocks, she resembled a plant trying to grow beneath the dark weight of a rock. Only a few hospital structures had bars on their windows; these were the buildings for the criminally insane. Clayton said that the people behind those bars had done especially nasty things, like killing their entire families.

“I know who you are,” the woman called out, slipping her arm through the bars and pointing at us. Her hair hung in oily strings.

We walked to the base of her building. “We know who you are, too,” I said, pointing back at her.

This pleased her immensely. She clapped her hands and left her window. When she came back, she had a plate of spaghetti in her hands. She held it up for us to see.

“That looks good,” Clayton said. “You're supposed to eat that.” He rubbed his belly for emphasis.

She spilled the spaghetti out through the bars. It slid down the building, a shimmering trail of sauce and noodles on the stone façade.

“There goes your lunch,” I called to her in a scolding voice.

“There goes my lunch,” she called back with enormous joy.

We left her like that and walked on toward the pit.

“What do you think it's like?” I asked Clayton. “Being crazy like her.”

“I think it's like being high!” he said.

“What do you know about being high?”

“I've seen lots of high people. What do you think it's like?”

“I think it's like being on another planet. Mars, say!”

“What's so good about that? They don't have air up there!”

“You bring your own air, Clayton. Didn't you ever read Tom Swift?”

“No. Who's that?”

“A kid in some books.”

Clayton just shook his head.

“You think we'll ever get like that woman?” I asked him.

“You will, for sure,” he said. “It runs in your family.”

“You don't go crazy from having it run in your family.”

“Don't you know anything? Going crazy is a hereditary thing. Everybody knows that. Count on it.”

A few years before this, my father's father had become senile. He started traveling across the city of Newark to see people who were no longer alive, stopped strangers on the street and claimed to be their friend. He thought his reflection in the mirror was another person, and sometimes he didn't recognize his wife. He was only fifty-seven years old when they took him away, and that was the thing my folks marveled over with their friends, the way a person's mind could evaporate at any time. My grandfather lived in a home where they kept him on drugs all day. My parents had taken me to visit him and I'd seen the miserable situation he was in. I'd bragged to Clayton about how bizarre it was—the way he had his meals in a high chair like a baby and didn't even know my name.

“Well, what about
your
family?” I said now. “How about your old man? Talk about crazy!”

“Yeah, but he's not
crazy
crazy,” Clayton said.

The school we attended was a bad place twelve miles away, populated by greasers and hoods and sniffers of glue. I should have lasted five minutes there, but I arrived in the same van that brought Clayton to school and I was shielded by his protective coloration. The nastiest thugs left Clayton alone, though they despised black people in theory. It was rumored that I, too, lived at the lunatic asylum. Clayton and I allowed this mistake to go uncorrected. He became my closest friend. My parents were appalled by this turn of events, but what could they say?

My friendship with Clayton consisted of countless little riffs we played over and over, but the special seal and symbol of our brotherhood was a prehistoric being known as Piltdown Man. Early in the year, our teacher, Mr. Marsh, had done a lesson on him in history class. They'd unearthed Piltdown Man's skull in England somewhere. It had the cranium of a human and the jaw of an ape, and this made Piltdown Man the original human being, the missing link, the hairy angel who'd vaulted evolution's monkey-chasm to become the thing we were today. Single-handedly, Piltdown Man had crossed the dark threshold into species-hood.

Mr. Marsh told us all this in his usual boring way, but then something inspired the man. It hit him that he should become Piltdown Man to show us, and this he did brilliantly—stooping over to half his height so that his arms slid out of his jacket sleeves, swinging his arms ape-fashion, grunting and bellowing as he lurched back and forth the length of the blackboard. He was a tall, goofy man with a crew cut and a bad complexion, and he was perfect as the man-beast responsible for all humanity. Clayton and I regarded each other with bugged-out eyes, our heads nodding up and down. Yes,
yes!
our startled faces said. This
is the real stuff! Check this out!

Nobody said anything out loud. Nobody laughed. The whole class was transfixed by Piltdown Man. Because the insane were never far from my mind, I wondered if Mr. Marsh was ready for the funny farm—as people always called it who didn't know exactly where the farm was located and what it was like. Then students around me started cackling. Clayton had joined Mr. Marsh at the dawn of human time. He was up from his desk, hunched over and grunting in the back of the room, doing a stunning black version of Piltdown Man.

The two of them carried on this way for a minute to our general delight, groaning and gesturing to each other across the room. It was Mr. Marsh's most successful interaction with Clayton. Then the big white ape-man cast his eyes around our world of people and people's things. “Piltdown Man!” he boomed, straightening up to become Homo erectus again. “Later proved to be a hoax.”

We sat there with idiotic grins on our faces.

“Hoax?” Clayton finally said, still dangling his arms. “What hoax you talking about?”

“Piltdown Man,” said Mr. Marsh. “Discovered, nineteen-eleven. Proved to be a hoax, nineteen-fifty-three. Those bones turned out to be fake.”

“What!” Clayton cried out.

“That's right,” Mr. Marsh said with enormous satisfaction. Astonishing Clayton, laying Clayton flat out with disbelief, was the greatest pedagogical achievement he could hope to have in our class.

“With people believing in him all that time?” Clayton said, returning to his desk. “Nineteen-eleven to nineteen-fifty-three?”

“Yup,” said Mr. Marsh.

“How could anybody do that?” I said. “Make fake bones like that?”

“Well, they were very clever,” Mr. Marsh answered with a smile. “Kind of like you guys.”

“Bull
shit!
” Clayton said.

The girls gasped and the boys snorted like little pigs. Mr. Marsh's happiness disappeared. “I don't want to hear that again, Clayton,” he said, for probably the three-hundredth time. Like all the teachers at our school, Mr. Marsh had to take great care not to appear to be picking on Clayton.

“You told us Piltdown Man was real,” Clayton stated.

“I did not,” Mr. Marsh replied.

I said, “You showed us how he walked and everything!”

Mr. Marsh turned to face me. “Gabriel,” he said kindly, “I was showing the class what people
thought
Piltdown Man was like. When they believed in him.”

“Well, how are we supposed to figure that out!” Clayton cried. “You're supposed to be teaching us stuff, and instead you're getting us all confused!”

Mr. Marsh leaned on the blackboard's eraser tray and rubbed his eyes.

“Did they get in trouble?” one of the girls asked. “The people who did the hoax?”

“They never found out who did it,” said Mr. Marsh.

“They never got caught?” the girl exclaimed.

“They got away with it?” cried one of her friends.

“Yes,” he said, looking at Clayton and me. “They got away with it.” He stared over our heads. “The perpetrators of that hoax took the secret to their graves,” he said, as if to himself.

His remark chilled the room. The idea of being in one's grave withered the triumph of not getting caught, and the class settled down. Mr. Marsh opened his English book and started diagramming sentences on the board. But Clayton did not agree that history was over. He raised the wooden top of his desk and put his head inside. The metal book-cavity was empty and made an echo chamber for his voice.
“Piltdown
Man!” he bellowed.

Mr. Marsh spun around. “Clayton, that's enough,” he declared.

My own desk had books and papers inside, ruining my echo.
“Later proved to be a hoax!”
I cried, but it came out muffled and indistinct.

We were sent to the principal's office. I was brave until they separated me from Clayton. Clayton was brave the whole time. He'd been to the principal's office many times before. The principal told me that if we ever again called Mr. Marsh “Piltdown Man” we would be expelled. “We weren't calling
him
Piltdown Man,” I said. “We were saying it about ourselves.” And only in saying this did I understand it was true. The principal, being the principal, didn't get the point.

We stopped making our joke in class. But like dogs we kept returning to the rotten thing we'd found—roaming the halls and playgrounds in the Piltdown crouch, grunting and hollering his name followed always by the heart-wrenching “Later proved to be a hoax!” Piltdown Man became our universal sign of everything the world contained. The authors of our textbooks were Piltdown Men, our classmates were Piltdown persons, all schools and governments and works of men were frauds. But the purest form of the Piltdown hoax on earth was the lone black boy among the whites, the indisputably impossible creature.

The cinder pit was just off the public road that looped the hospital grounds. A guardrail kept cars from driving where the shoulder of the road thickened to become the cliff. The pit resembled a quarry. Bulldozers moved the glistening blackness and loaded it into trucks for the asylum's icy roads in winter. The cinders themselves were a loose, oddly lightweight substance, like crushed pumice stone, but dirty. Walking across the pit, you sank past your ankles and the coarse, sooty grit filled your shoes. It was a filthy place to play. The cinders turned my skin jet-black, which my mother bemoaned when I fouled her tub and washing machine, but which gave Clayton as much pleasure as seeing me blush in school. Cinder soot didn't make his skin any darker, and he couldn't turn red in the face. Nothing showed up on Clayton.

The pit was a prehistoric place where Piltdown Man would have felt at home. I always thought of him when we went there, that cave dweller no one believed in anymore. I stood on the cliff and imagined Piltdown Man on the desolate black plain below, wandering the primeval landscape in his crouch, human but not really, hunting and foraging, his eye out for a mate, never imagining that someday people would call him a hoax.

We took a few jumps off the cliff, me from the shallow end, Clayton from the thrilling peak, plunging knee-deep into the granular stuff and then scrambling back up the side to do it again. When I wasn't looking, Clayton grabbed me in a headlock and dragged me to the highest place. He said he would count to three, but he jumped on two. I went over head-first, fell short into the scooped-out face of the pit, and somersaulted twenty feet down. When Clayton saw I wasn't dead, he laughed. I was still struggling out of the cinders when a voice spoke to us.